A Reader on Reading

Vladimir Nabokov, criticized by his friend Edmund Wilson for producing a translation of Eugene Onegin “with warts and all,” responded that the translator’s business was not to improve or comment on the original but to give the reader ignorant of one language a text recomposed in all the equivalent words of another. Nabokov apparently believed (though I find it hard to imagine that the master craftsman meant this) that languages are “equivalent” in both sense and sound, and that what is imagined in one language can be reimagined in another—without an entirely new creation taking place. But the truth is (as every translator finds out at the beginning of the first page) that the phoenix imagined in one language is nothing but a barnyard chicken in another, and to invest that singular fowl with the majesty of the bird born from its own ashes, a different language might require the presence of a different creature, plucked from bestiaries that possess their own notions of strangeness. In English, for instance, the word phoenix still has a wild, evocative ring; in Spanish, ave fénix is part of the bombastic rhetoric inherited from the seventeenth century.

In the early Middle Ages, translation (from the past participle of the Latin transferre, “to transfer”) meant conveying the relics of a saint from one place to another. Sometimes these translations were illegal, as when saintly remains were stolen from one town and carried away for the greater glory of another, which is how the body of Saint Mark was transferred from Constantinople to Venice, hidden under a cartful of pork, which the Turkish guards at Constantinople’s gates refused to touch. Carrying away something precious and making it one’s own by whatever means possible: this definition serves the act of literary translation perhaps better than Nabokov’s.

No translation is ever innocent. Every translation implies a reading, a choice both of subject and interpretation, a refusal or suppression of other texts, a redefinition under the terms imposed by the translator, who, for the occasion, usurps the title of author. Since a translation cannot be impartial, any more than a reading can be unbiased, the act of translation carries with it a responsibility that extends far beyond the limits of the translated page, not only from language to language but often within the same language, from genre to genre, or from the shelves of one literature to those of another. In this not all “translations” are acknowledged as such: when Charles and Mary Lamb turned Shakespeare’s plays into prose tales for children, or when Virginia Woolf generously herded Constance Garnett’s versions of Turgenev “into the fold of English Literature,” the displacements of the text into the nursery or into the British Library were not regarded as “translations” in the etymological sense. Lamb or Woolf, every translator disguises the text with another, attractive or detractive meaning.

Were translation a simple act of pure exchange, it would offer no more possibilities for distortion and censorship (or improvement and enlightening) than photocopying or, at most, scriptorium transcription. But that isn’t so. If we acknowledge that every translation, simply by transferring the text to another language, space, and time, alters it for better or for worse, then we must also acknowledge that every translation — transliteration, retelling, relabeling

—adds to the original text a prêt-à-porter reading, an implicit commentary. And that is where the censor comes in.

That a translation may hide, distort, subdue, or even suppress a text is a fact tacitly recognized by the reader who accepts it as a “version” of the original, a process Joachim de Bellay described in 1549, in his Défense et exemple de la langue française: “And what shall I say of those more properly called traitors than translators, since they betray those whom they aim to reveal, tarnishing their glory, and seducing ignorant readers by reading white for black?”